Those who wish to avoid system should quit Verizon, AT&T, Comcast, or Time Warner service

After months of delays, a "six strikes" system designed to curb copyright infringement will go live in the United States, affecting customers on many of the nations' top internet service providers (ISPs). While avoiding the most draconian of punishments proposed in past plans -- severing offenders' internet connections -- the system will carry serious consequences including connection throttling and forced "education" from anti-piracy groups.

The simple solution for business people in that situation is to cancel their service with AT&T, Verizon, Comcast, or Time Warner and seek a local alternative.

Of course that approach could be difficult in some regions, and may become infeasible if more ISPs jump on the CCI bandwagon. For now, though, there are alternatives for many customers who want to avoid the system.

Well there goes public WIFI from McDonalds, Starbucks, etc, and practically any internet cafe.

This is such a backwards agression to piracy prevention. It isn't going to stop real pirates who use private trackers on torrent communities, anyway, which is where 'real' piracy happens. It will hurt clueless people, not those who do the yet-unproven "monetary damage" to the industry.

Yup, nothing media has ever done has been able to stop the major pirates who actually distribute and profit from pirated movies and software. The vast majority of piracy for profit is going on in other countries.

Yes along with the worst kind of pirate they face the imaginary lost profit from poor people profit. You know the ones that wouldnt buy it anyways they would just wait for it to be on tv the fast forward through the commercials. I always love the creative "we lost X many dollars due to this" mentality. Yet they never pay the stars for lost profit.

So they should just get it all for free while the working class pay? That mentality is a tough sale on all the non-dependants that continue to be squeezed for every cent possible because the rich and the poor want it all.

It seems like its a more creative idea to get the working class to always pay for everyone elses's LUXURIES, not necessitties.

Just why are 'poor people' as you refer to them entitled to everything I have to earn?

FiOS user here; I'm planning to start paying for a personal VPN soon. Other than privacy, VPN also gets you access to region blocked content (such as the BBC, if you're an American). That in mind, I feel like $3 a month is a pretty good deal compared to ~$100+ for a premium cable package.

Google for expat shield (spam filter here is preventing me from posting the link. It's a free VPN (endpoint is in the UK, so you can get BBC videos). It does add ads to your browser while it's in use. I picked it up during the Olympics to bypass some of the NBC silliness.

Why go with a service? If you were really interested in privacy, why not invest in a firewall with built in vpn? You don't need enterprise class, but you basically relinquich you privacy to a different service provider and defeat the point if you go with an external service.

It's more the principle of the thing. Not every ISP is participating in this six strikes program. It's a voluntary program. Normally, the market takes care of these things by letting people vote with their feet. If the ISP does something you don't like, you switch to a different ISP.

However, due to the government-granted internet duopolies most people face, they may not have a third choice of ISP who is not participating. You can't "vote with your feet" if both your choices are participating in six strikes. In that situation, using a VPN is your only way to protest their decision to participate. (Only realistic way. I suppose you could cancel your internet service, but that's not very realistic in this day and age.)

Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't you still need an endpoint to tunnel TO though, if you are trying to encrypt P2P traffic coming to your router? That's what a VPN service provides. Sure, with a VPN firewall you can VPN into your home network from the outside, but what good does that do in this case? The infringing IP address will still be yours. With a VPN service, the alert system sees the service's IP address. Unless there's something that I'm not seeing here...

If the point is that because the public IP doesn't actually belong to you irrespective of encryption, that's only gonna last for so long before these services start being cracked down on I would venture to guess.

If the gov can compell an ISP to ID a user, I would imagine it's only a matter of time before they could compell a service provider of this nature.

Many VPN services don't keep activity logs at all and they advertise this fact. They cannot be compelled to reveal what they don't know. My understanding is that the MPAA finds out that somebody using the VPN service downloaded a movie (or whatever) from BitTorrent, but they can't connect it to a user because all they have is one of the VPN service's external IP addresses. They can lobby Congress to make a law requiring logs for VPN, but that's another story.

This is just what I've read on various tech sites. I don't use VPN services, because I don't download stuff from P2P, so take with a grain of salt. I still maintain that VPN is useless without a network to connect to, though.

An anonymous proxy or TOR client/server implementation would help, although with all of the logging going on by ISPs I would think the authorities *could* still track you down if they wanted to. There are many countries with laws on the books, or probably soon to be on the books, requiring ISPs to log activity making it easier to track someone internationally if they all cooperate.

If you are actually participating in serious piracy, sure, they will track you down. But if you are mainly concerned with casual P2P use by your kids, etc, when big media looks at the IP address and sees another country (or anything NOT provided by one of their 6 strikes partners) they will just pass because the effort is too high.